Their Kingdom for a PornPal

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Their Kingdom for a PornPal

Porn-site operators have long found that it's easy to make a buck in the online adult industry. The hard part is getting the entire $1 into your hands.

In the United States, adult webmasters typically use credit-card processors that take 10 percent to 15 percent out of each charge in return for accepting the risk of working with an industry known for its high level of "chargebacks." Those are the refunds – a huge hassle for Visa and MasterCard – that customers often get when they claim there's absolutely no possible way they signed up for an $80 annual membership to, say, a balloon-fetish sex site.

Now, some porn insiders think they have a better idea: Why not reduce fees by directly tapping the checking accounts of users with a billing system like PayPal?

With such a system, they could even charge people 99 cents per glimpse at a dirty picture, a la iTunes. Think "PornPal," but maybe not by that name. (The PayPal people, who haven't worked with the adult industry since they were bought up by eBay three years ago, might sue.)

The porn folks even have a potential suitor in mind: the world's largest search-engine company.

Last month, word leaked out that Google was looking to create an online payment system, perhaps along the lines of PayPal. Even as Google tried to dampen speculation, porn-site operators dared to dream. Maybe, just maybe, the new Google Wallet would embrace the wide world of sites with names like Panty Squad and Kinkymaturesluts.com.

"It's going to be a very tempting proposition for Google to pick up where PayPal left off," said Andy Beal, a vice president at the search-engine-marketing firm WebSourced.

Indeed, the market for a new billing scheme is wide open. Some adult webmasters are experimenting with payment systems based in Europe that allow micropayments, said Kevin Blatt, spokesman for Mobbucks.com, a network of porn sites.

Cell phones may provide other ways to bill people for X-rated material. However, there's no porn equivalent with the cachet of PayPal.

"My guess is that nobody has taken into account the profitability of such a venture," Blatt said.

Even if entrepreneurs do consider the prospects, the financial world is skeptical of adult businesses and may be hard-pressed to support a PayPal-like startup, said Sam Sugar, a porn-industry blogger. Sugar wrote an open letter urging Google to consider its current bond to the porn business – adult sites litter its search listings – and to think about the moneymaking opportunity.

Will Google bite? For now, it isn't saying much. In a written statement, chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said the company is "working on things in e-commerce." But it doesn't intend to offer a PayPal-type system, he said. The company declined to provide further details about its plans.

Beal expects Google will use its new payment system to allow users to buy access to videos for small amounts of money. Even if it doesn't expect to take on PayPal immediately, Google has shown a willingness to adapt to changing times, Beal said.

"There's definitely a high chance that they'll compete with (PayPal) in the future," he said.

But Sugar's letter has already spawned some backlash in the blogosphere. Google's internal do-no-evil policy might make it wary of playing footsy with X-rated types. There are also the distractions of online porn's battle with federal prosecutors and its fight against the proposed .xxx domain.